Synology Auto-Update

We've been actively promoting Synology Rackstations for many years now and they do provide exceptional performance for our customers, but they also come with a selection of annoyances that you need to be aware of when running them. If you have managed storage or any of our support or outsourcing services then we'll take care of these units for you, but if not then please read on.

Auto-Update is an important part of any strategy and of course Synology provides the same functionality which can be found in Control Panel / Update & Restore / Update Settings.

Here we have updates to be applied automatically at 3am when available. This will mean your system will always be up to date with the latest patches and fixes.

A second level of protection comes from the package centre auto-updates which can be enabled in Package Centre / Settings / Auto Update and will look something like...

But you can never leave your Synology servers to just update themselves without intervention as we've discovered today, for example when we found that all our customers who have managed storage were showing package updates available (via CMS) but they weren't auto-updating. We investigated this further and found that Synology have made a change that effects everyone but notified no one.

When opening the package centre from DSM on the server you find this fascinating dialogue

and of course all the updates have stopped auto-updating because of this.

Now we have 300+ Synology Servers on management and so far today we've only managed to do a fraction of that, but over the next few days we'll login to each of the boxes, tick the box and then let auto-update do its thing. I'm sure for domestic users this isn't important, but when you've got 300+ to do its really annoying and time consuming so thanks for that Synology.